"A Small Town's Big Vision"by Heidi Petty

In the small town of Crockett, nestled along the shore of the Carquinez Strait, the community came together to create a vision for the future of its shoreline. Around the turn of the century, the industrial age and an increase in population created a distinct separation between the native ecosystems and the people. Many areas along the Carquinez shoreline and its waterways were disturbed; waterways were buried under buildings and parking lots, and areas of shoreline were filled in with gravel and dirt. People manipulated the natural landscape around them to suit their needs without giving much thought to the ecosystems that existed there.

Decades later, the Contra Costa Resource Conservation District (CCRCD) helped form the Crockett Recover the Waterfront (CReW) Committee. The CReW Committee intends to bring back the natural beauty of the Crockett shoreline, and it began this process by creating a Community Vision Plan as a guide. In order to do this, the CCRCD and the CReW Committee brought over 260 community members (nearly 10% of the town’s population) together in a series of four public participation meetings to brainstorm ideas that best blended the beauty of the Crockett shoreline with the needs of the local community.

At these meetings, CReW set out to gather the ideas and concerns of the community that best combined human engagement with natural resource conservation. CReW engaged the community in a consensus-based process that involved community members in making decisions. While conceptualizing projects, the enthusiastic group was able to interact and discuss concerns—and exclude ideas that would be infeasible. The Vision Plan that arose from this public input addresses the concepts that came to fruition during these meetings. As a result of the public input at these meetings, the Community Vision Plan addresses the concepts that the community deemed most important and feasible.​The planning process for this important natural corridor has been led by the CCRCD, the CReW Committee, and the Carquinez Regional Environmental Education Center (CREEC). The CCRCD has a long-standing partnership with CREEC, and both organizations have a long history of environmental stewardship, planning, and restoration. To date, the CCRCD has sponsored and coordinated six community watershed planning programs across Contra Costa County funded through grants. The CCRCD is proud of the community’s work to create the Carquinez Recover the Waterfront Community Vision Plan. This grassroots effort shows how important local citizens can be in shaping the futures of their communities...one project at a time.